How Animals Grieve (5 page)

SYDNEY AND ANGEL.
PHOTO BY CONSTANCE B. HOSKINSON.

When Sydney was thirteen years old, Connie adopted a second dog, an adult Maltese named Angel. Sydney’s life changed again. He took great pleasure in the company of his new friend—so much, that he defected from his nightly sleeping spot on Connie’s bed and joined Angel in the kitchen. For three years the pair slept side by side, Sydney in his blue dog bed and Angel in her pink one.

Then, suddenly, Angel died of a heart attack. Terribly upset, Connie awaited the arrival of a neighbor who would help her bury Angel. She placed Angel’s body back in her small pink bed. Sydney crawled into that bed and lay with his head on Angel’s still form.

Angel was buried that day. For the next three weeks, Sydney searched the house for her. One time, Connie found him in the laundry room, where Angel’s bed was waiting to be washed. Sydney had pushed the bed over, apparently looking for Angel. Soon, he began to eat poorly, a pattern that only worsened over the three weeks. Despite counsel from a vet,
and
Connie’s constant affection and offers of all kinds of food, Sydney lost weight. The thinner he became, the more worried Connie became.

Sydney had resumed sleeping in Connie’s bed, reverting to the pattern of his pre-Angel days. One morning, Connie awoke to find that he had died during the night. She believes that Sydney just couldn’t survive the loss of Angel.

Connie recalls what happened when she next took a neighborhood walk—her first one alone in sixteen years. “When my neighbor walked out to the street to meet me,” she told me, “he was holding out his arms, because he knew for me to be walking alone, it had to be that my constant companion was gone.”

To witness the mourning of a surviving animal can be a second blow, following close on the death of a pet. An online discussion of dog grief brought forth a cry for help in this regard. A woman’s eighteen-year-old dachshund, Ginger, had been euthanized on a vet’s recommendation. After fourteen years shared with Ginger, the woman felt her loss deeply. Her sad state was compounded when her second dog, an eight-year-old who had lived with Ginger since the age of six weeks, began to decline, much as Connie’s Sydney had. It got to the point where the younger dog, Heidi, simply refused to eat. Her sleep was terribly disrupted as well. Ginger and Heidi had always eaten together, the woman reported, and they loved the same treats. “The treats are the only thing now that Heidi has even a slight interest in.” The woman sought help: how could she help ease Heidi’s grief ?

In response to queries of this kind,
Modern Dog
magazine offered tips for dog owners in a sidebar to the article in which Mickey and Piercy were featured. Statistics from the ASPCA’s Companion Animal Mourning project indicate that two-thirds of dogs exhibit negative behavioral changes after losing another dog from their household; these changes may linger for up to six months.

Loss of appetite, lethargy, and anxiety behaviors such as pacing and being “clingy” are the main changes for which a dog’s caretaker should watch. Offering a grieving dog a regular exercise regime, enrichment such as toys and treats, and renewed training to provide extra routine and structure, all may help. Drugs such as Elavil and Prozac, the magazine suggests, may be needed in severe cases.

In
tandem with exploring the sensitive emotional nature of dogs, we might ask some questions that depart from the scientific mainstream. Can dogs not only feel the death of a loved companion but somehow intuit when it is about to occur? Queries like this one are common among dog people, ranging from the sober-minded, “show me the evidence” types to those who embrace more inferential, “New Age” modes of thinking.

A few years ago, a caller to a radio program I was on recounted how one night, her dog, a dachshund, became agitated, vocalizing and behaving in unusual ways. The next morning, the caller learned by telephone that one of the dog’s puppies—now living with another family—had died the previous night.

Could the dachshund’s atypical behaviors be explained by some intuition of her pup’s death? How, short of telepathy (an ability about which I am acutely skeptical), could a dog possibly come by this knowledge? The mother was separated not only from her pup but also from any person who had knowledge of the death. Here we venture deep into contested territory. It’s a surprisingly popular claim that some dogs just “know things,” as when they predict with great precision (by their excited behavior) their owners’ return from work or travel. This precision holds, the claim goes, even when the return is unexpected or happens at an irregular time of day.

Events videotaped by the researcher Rupert Sheldrake show that dogs really do behave with excited anticipation when their owners start toward home from a distant location. One camera recorded the movements of a British woman called Pat Smart, while a second recorded those of her dog, Jaytee. Even when Sheldrake’s researchers varied the timing of Smart’s movements and controlled for other factors that might have caused Jaytee to become excited, the dog, through his behavior, indicated an awareness of Smart’s setting off toward home. His alertness level shifted quickly and he began to look for Smart out the window. (For detailed analysis, see chapter 9 of my book
Being with Animals
).

Even when confronted with evidence of this sort, I’m wary. How could I not be? Scientists aren’t much in the habit of accepting tales that rest on concepts uncomfortably close to animal ESP. Rigidly controlled research on more dogs is badly needed. And not only on dogs, either.

Oscar
is a cat who is said to predict when elderly people in a Rhode Island nursing home are about to die. When Oscar curls up on the bed of a sick resident, staff members telephone the family to say that their loved one’s death appears to be imminent—because the cat is just that reliable. David Dosa, the doctor who first described Oscar’s behavior in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, later wrote a book about this unusual phenomenon. Sometimes, given the age and poor health of the nursing home’s population, Oscar was forced to split his attention. If two residents neared death at about the same time, Oscar would stay with one till the end, then race on to the next. He wasn’t prone to lingering with the body. Though his presence did give comfort to the families of dying patients, his behavior centered not on expressing grief but on detecting the near approach of death.

As Oscar makes clear, acute sensitivities in our pets are not confined to dogs. The explanation for Oscar’s death predictions lies, I believe, with the smell of molecules called ketones as they are released from a dying body. This medical explanation does not diminish the fact that Oscar is a remarkable animal; it may be that his nose is not unusual, but his unique way of responding to what he smells is.

Our detour away from dog grief underscores the idea that domestic animals pay keen attention to what is happening around them. Yet just as not every smart cat is Oscar, not every dog mourns when confronted with death. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of making universality a criterion for the existence of a phenomenon—by which I mean, we shouldn’t require every dog to grieve in order to believe that some dogs do.

An intriguing comment, made as part of another Web-based discussion of dog grief, illustrates this variability in behavior:

When I had to have Number One Dog put to sleep, Number Two Dog went to the vet’s office too and was given an opportunity to see her best bud’s remains. She was decidedly not interested, and I felt like a bit of a fool for anthropomorphizing her. I have no idea whether she ever “got” death. In fact, I suspect she didn’t have a clue. The body she saw at the vet’s office wasn’t her lifelong friend; it was a thing she didn’t know.

Perhaps some dogs simply lack the brainpower to make the connection between a dead body and a living, loved friend. I’m suspicious of this
interpretation,
however. Dog Two Number may well have been aware that the death had occurred, and may even have recognized the body, but nonetheless been indifferent to the other dog’s death. Indeed, the owner remarked, being the only dog was very much to Dog Number Two’s liking; this new status meant that she received more attention, and thus her life improved, a far more important outcome, for her, than the first dog’s death.

Whether or not Dog Number Two recognized her late companion, reliable eyewitness reports strongly hint that some animals, from elephants to chimpanzees to bison, do recognize that a body represents, in changed form, a fellow animal who was once very much alive. We’ll come to these stories later in the book.

Finally, a powerful photograph and accompanying tale about the actions of one Labrador retriever compel us to think hard about what mental connection dogs may make when a death occurs. In summer 2011, thirty American soldiers serving in Afghanistan were killed when the Tali-ban shot down their Chinook helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade. Amid this enormous tragedy, one dog caught the nation’s attention.

Hawkeye was the dog of US Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson, age thirty-five, one of the soldiers to die in the helicopter crash. Hawkeye had been a constant presence in Tumilson’s life for years. When it came time for Tumilson’s funeral, held in a school gymnasium in Rockford, Iowa, and packed with fifteen hundred mourners, Hawkeye was included. In fact, he led the family down the aisle toward the flag-draped casket. When a close friend of Tumilson’s stood to eulogize the soldier, Hawkeye did something no one expected. He followed the friend to the front of the gym, lay down in front of the casket, and stayed there for the duration of the service. A photograph captured the solemnity of the occasion and the dog’s fixed presence at the coffin.

Skeptics might offer alternative hypotheses to account for the dog’s choice of a position right in front of the casket: Maybe it was just a coincidence, a comfortable place to rest, and Hawkeye had no comprehension that his dearest friend occupied the casket.

I prefer to take a second detour, around such objections. I am thinking instead about Hawkeye in the context of everything that we know about dog love, loyalty, and cognition, stretching back eighty years to
the
actions of a dog in Japan. I am reflecting upon Hawkeye’s love for Jon Tumilson. And following this route, I come to know something and know it to a certainty: Whether Hawkeye grasped that Tumilson was in the casket isn’t the key to understanding Hawkeye’s grief, or any dog’s grief.

When loyal dogs grieve, for a person or for another dog, they grieve because they have loved.

3

MOURNING ON THE FARM

Storm Warning was a beautiful thoroughbred with a challenging personality. So many things spooked the horse: umbrellas, bicycles, small dogs, ponies, even people who removed an item of clothing while riding him. Storm, as he was called, was just a bit neurotic. But he lucked out in one way: he enjoyed a fifteen-year close relationship with Mary Stapleton, who happens to be a psychologist. Acutely attuned to people’s fears and anxieties, Mary transferred her insights and calming abilities to the horse. Even as Mary and Storm competed in the dressage ring, they worked together on Storm’s fears. In Mary’s words, Storm “learned to jump and face all of his terrors with great courage.”

Then, one night when he was eighteen years old, tragedy struck. Storm had been turned out into a field at the farm where he lived in a herd with other geldings. An accident of some sort must have occurred, for in the morning, Storm was found to be severely injured. Examination revealed a compound fracture in his hind leg, too extensive for successful treatment. Right there in the field where he had spent his happiest days, Storm was put down. And right there he was buried.

Horse people will recognize, Mary says, how unusual it is for a horse to be interred in the fields where he had lived. Mary still expresses gratitude to the farm’s owner for affording Storm such a burial.

The evening after Storm’s death, Mary walked out into the field alone. Approaching the large mound that now covered the horse’s remains, she placed on the ground his favorite flowers—flowers he used to eat. “I heard the horses grazing around me,” Mary says, “and was, as always,
comforted
by their presence. Slowly, at least six of the group stood around the mound, stopped grazing, and looked at the grave. I realized we, the horses and I, had formed a circle around the fallen Storm.”

To Mary, this event felt eerie, all the more so once she realized exactly who the encircling horses were: Storm’s companions, the geldings who were part of his herd. The geldings stood with lowered heads, which implied a straight-ahead gaze. “If horses hold their heads high,” Mary explained, “they are scanning far away. But Storm’s group clearly was at the right visual angle for looking directly at the burial site.” Other horses, nearby in the field but new to the farm and not part of Storm’s herd group, did not join the circle. None of the gathered horses ate the flowers Mary had placed on the grave, and she had brought no other treats. Whatever drew Storm’s companions to his burial place, it wasn’t the hope of food. In spontaneously forming a circle at his grave, Storm’s herdmates began a vigil of sorts; Mary found them still there the next morning. A cautious person, Mary acknowledges that many interpretations of this behavior are possible. “I choose to think,” she says, “that I was allowed to share a circle of mourning for our mutual, loved companion.”